著者

丸島 令子

出版者

神戸女学院大学

雑誌

女性学評論 (ISSN:09136630)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.16, pp.89-120, 2002-03

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The combination of prolonged survival and reduced birth rate has changed Japan from a young society to an aging, even old, society.An increase in the survival rate means most people can look forward to a longer asulthood.Life is seen as progress through the stages of infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.Adulthood may be arbitrarily subdivided into early adulthood, middle adulthood and later adulthood.Many studies in later adulthood show that not all age-related changes after maturity involve decay or deterioration.Gains in some aspects of intelligence continue long in later adulthood.At first, researchers in psychology looked for a connection between creativity and intelligence.It soon become clear that a certain level of intelligence would be neccessary for creativity to flourish.There is no indication that age-related declines in creativity are the results of declines in cognitive, intelligence function.For one thing, sometimes, the peak of creative productivity takes places during later adulthood, in the sixties, seventies, or even later.Wisdom is also an aspect of cognition and intelligence that develops with age.An average older asult may not be wiser than an average younger adult, but profound wisdom is likely to develop among the old.Erikson(1982) saw wisdom as the peak of ego development.He proposed that wisdom developed in the old when they found meaning in life and accepted the immminence of their own death, successfuly resolving the conflict between integrity and despair.He also described slf-trancendence as another aspect of wisdom.Now, many personality theories incorporate the link between wisdom and personality.Erikson viewed middle adulthood as a period of both transition and crisis.According to Erikson(1950,1963), middle age is a time when social norms require that a person should be a productive, contributing member of society, and if an individual has a sense of productivity and contributes to what is socially expected, the individual will have a sense of generativity(intergenerational relations).However, if an individual feels he or she has not fulfilled role requirements, a sense of stangnation, which means a sense of crisis, can result.Some longitudinal studies conclude that evidence of personality stability throughout middle adulthood refledts ego-psychologocal development for successful aging.